James Coddington, CEO of SkillsVR, joins Cheddar Innovates to discuss how virtual reality is being used to train frontline workers to deal with difficult customers, and how this technology is being applied to diversity training.

Cheddar Innovates

See How Virtual Reality is Training Workers to Deal With Difficult Customers

Welcome back to cheddar innovates brought to you by curiosity. Stream reports. Find that virtual reality revenue around the globe will surpass $12 billion by 2024. And the opportunities with this technology are endless. Especially as we talk about things like the metaverse. Skills VR is a company creating virtual reality hardware and software to be used for employee training. Joining us now is James Coddington Ceo of Skills VR. James glad to have you on this morning. Can you just walk us through how this all works? Sure thing. Good morning. How are you and ship? Um So the core of what skills VR is is we're an enterprise operating platform for VR but we're also agnostic to any hardware our customers use. Uh so operating platform we provide administrative controls, learning records, remote facilitation, proof of impact analytics. And we also verify learners competencies against set learning records and what does it actually all mean? It means that we create um immersive, engaging and enjoyable training sessions in a three D. Environment. We gamify it. We ensure that the were providing greater skills competency and confidence and resilience all in the VR world. So while someone is going through a VR experience they're being assessed by how they're able to apply their knowledge in VR. So it's not doing a quiz it's not uh you're not being quizzed against how well you can remember something or regurgitate what you've just learned. You're actually being assessed against how well you can apply the knowledge in a VR world and at the end of each VR experience. The individual receives a learning record or a micro credential which can be shared with organizations own L. And D. Platforms. So having this really granular data available for organizations, the organizations able to verify competencies across the workforce, which becomes incredibly powerful. You're unable to do that in e learning and you certainly can't do that in face to face learning. So VR is really bringing to life training in a more fun, engaging and immersive way. Now we know you're currently working with frontline workers trained staff, you know, dealing with difficult customers. I think we saw some of that kind of on the video there. Can you just break down exactly how frontline workers are able to utilize this tech toward that end. You know, as we know, frontline workers have been savaged in in in a lot of different areas and and Covid did not did not help that at all. Whether it's wearing face masks or or whether they're just interacting with with customers and the customers are becoming more and more angry really. All the frontline workers have to do that. Just Put on the headset and off they go. It's that easy. It's about a 15-20 minute training session in in VR. And they learn conflict management techniques and and so some of that is they they're learning awareness of themselves and others and and how to stay calm in that situation. They learned tactical breathing techniques, they learn how to um how to how to view tone and body language. Uh, and also watching out for scenes. Uh, the signs like escalation and aggressive behavior and how they can how do they can monitor that and how they can pick that up with people's um inter nations, their their body stances and and also how how well they can use their communication to de escalate that situation, um creating space with their hands and also their voice. So really, um yes, sorry, carry on. No, I was saying I find it fascinating that you can go from that kind of training and then pivot over to how this applies to diversity training because we know that's another use case for this. Can you also talk about kind of diversity training, how it works in terms of being able to deliver that training through a VR experience? Yeah, sure. So I think we've probably all gone through diversity training in some form or other and and I have to say most fail in in the in the in the core of what diversity training should be all about. And its diversity training at the at the foremost should be all about awareness of self and others. So the real world experience we use is witnessing and really emotionally charged scene of two people arguing on a train. And we begin by forming an opinion about who was right and who is wrong and also listening to the other train passages and what what their opinions were about the about the scene and and then talking about that within a group and then you hear perspectives of characters which just was not your perspective and and it starts to make you questioning your biases and how you're actually able to interact with the with that scene and not just that scene but when you actually come back to reality. So diversity training should start with that awareness of our own biases and worldviews which in turn affects every decision that we make on the planet. So acknowledging and accepting that other people have different biases and worldviews helps us understand each other so much better. And so we approach others in a place of an empathy and understanding and making us more tolerant of others differences. So in that whole VR experience you're able to learn probably the core empathy communication and how you're able to interact with people in the real world. I wonder then how do you pivot and how do you adapt this into the metaverse? Because that is kind of the next gen of this. It is and it isn't it isn't it interesting that the company puts matter in front of their name and all of a sudden metaverse becomes a thing. Um metaverse has been around for quite some time and and the core of the metaverse is is the and we're already pioneering the way for organizations to develop a greater skills, competency, confidence and resilience in that metaverse but our experiences, it transports learners to a virtual place where they can play, they can learn, they can grow both individually and collectively with with their teams. So and our enterprise cloud solution takes this capability and makes it possible for organizations to either take something off the shelf created themselves, interact with other people within the metaverse and also create a metaverse for their own organization where individuals and groups can interact in a VR environment and it's super cool and it's really engaging and and it creates The highest learning outcomes that have ever been seen. So you're talking 90 plus percent of learning recognize versus in a classroom is less than 20% before I have to let you go here. I only got about 20 seconds but I'm just curious what plans are you making for this technology to be accessible to all? Yeah we we feel very strongly that this this technology should be accessible to all. We were part of what we do is um we're a social business where we want to make available this technology to ever run. So by the end of this year um every single secondary school in the U. S. Will have access to VR and we're working closely with NGos corporations and some very large content providers to ensure that every school child From age 13 to 18 has the opportunity to connect and engage with this technology which is world class education. It certainly seems like cool technology and one that has just so much implications in the future. James Coddington, Ceo of Skills, VR.